Due to some internet outage (don't you love it when they are improving but don't tell you!) Its a bit later than I intended but we have a winner!

mail or DM me your details and I'll send your dreamcatcher asap :)

If you didn't win but would like a dreamcatcher check back soon for a video on how to make it!

Hi and welcome to my little blog! The following post is my entry in the mastermind blogtour organised by the lovely Dee. Do go and check the other bloggers out here.
Dee's thought up this blogtour to inspire other women like ourselves to take the leap and get themselves out there, sharing their wisdom.

If this is your first visit I have a longish about me up there, the shorter version is this:
I am a mama on a journey trough motherhood working towards wholeness. I share my spiritual musings here, bits on family life and other happening from my day to day.

I am stil very new at this so I figured I share with you some random bits that came up for me as a new blogger.

My blog was started with a desire to share and inspire other mums, especially with regards to spirituality and wholeness. I realised quickly that I was stepping way way out of my comfort zone. Up until the start of my blog these musings where shared with only a few people in my life certainly not any and every stranger that I bumped into in the streets!
After posting a blog I would often lie in bed (and who am I kidding often still do!) wondering if I sound stupid, what do people think of me. Do they think I am a weirdo? Do they judge me?

Chances are that several people stop by read a post and think I am stupid or ridiculous and many would think I am a weirdo!
At some point I realised that it doesn't matter. I know what I know and I experience what I experience. My journey is not the same as the next person's journey. I am not here to convince the haters I am here to inspire and connect with those who know and experience life in a similar way to me! Still its difficult to silence that inner critic at times!

A very kind goddess on the goddess circle offered to teach me the ropes in SEO (search engine optimisation) and help me define my "mission" better. I never would have thought that doing this would have made such a huge difference for me! She is helping me define everything very clearly, opening up topics that where there somewhere in my mind but somehow to scared to come forward.
When I started I knew in my heart what I wanted and I have always been more of a person to show you what I feel than to tell you what I feel. Having SEO training gave me the words to label myself (even though I hate labels, they have their uses!) it is enabling me to find others who talk about similar subject. I would say to anyone wishing to get themselves into the blogging world find someone who knows their SEO stuff it would be money and time well spend!

The other part in writing this blog is well the writing part. I dream of being Anne of Green Gables who always seemed to have the right poetic phrase ready in every situation. Instead I feel at times like what I wrote came straight from a babelfish translation! If I could knit you my thoughts it would probably be so much more poetic! I cringed many times hovering over the delete button, wondering why people would read this. and then a goddess sister reminded me that practice makes perfect and by keeping this record not only was I reaching out right now instead of in 10 years when I (maybe) am a really good writer, I was also showing progress in that journey right here in my words. Someone coming to my blog would see that growth in my writing and through my writing growth in me. Showcasing exactly that journey that I wish to document here.

That brings me to the giveaway!
A few months ago I met Amy Oscar trough twitter she very kindly gave me a copy of her book "Sea of Miracles".
Sea of miracles is a book about angels and being in contact with them. Amy shares many stories of people all over who have had contact with angels and she also shares her own stories. I thoroughly enjoyed the book!

At some point during the reading of this book I started to get feathers, lots of them. I now have feathers in practically every corner of the house.
The feathers for me are a constant reminder that I am not alone. Not alone in my experiences, not alone in life in general.  I have started to attache these feathers to gifts and use them in a variety of places always telling people where the feather came from. One of my favourite things to make is these small dreamcatchers and for the purpose of this blogtour a dreamcatcher seemed so perfect! This one was crafted using red and gold thread (colours of wealth and prosperity!) with 3 groups of 3x3 moonstone (powerful stone for women!) beads and 3 angelfeathers (Do I need to explain the number 3?) and as with anything I craft, a tiny bell for that bit of positive energy.

Fancy winning this? Gain entries to this giveaway by:

• Leaving a comment
• join the facebook group for another entry (on the right)
  
• follow my tweets for another entry
• join the elist for another entry (on the right)
  
• tweet/blog/facebook about the giveaway for another entry

Entries close Friday 8 pm UK time

We reached 50 (and passed it!) on my facebook group so as promised a giveaway!
I just double checked and there are 53 people in the group so I added the numbers to random.org and clicked the button

number 25 to join is Dee! I'm of to contact her and chat about making a custom medicine pouch :)
Next giveaway at 100!

I thought I'd explain a little why I choose to join Sara in her blog relaunch and why I'll join her in promoting her summer of self love. And why the subject of self love is so important to me....

I grew up with an abusive father and lived with him up until I was 5 and my parents divorced. The effect he had on not only my mothers self worth and esteem but also my brothers and mine is still noticable today.

I guess you could say I was the lucky one, I realised early on that it was his issue not mine, that the things he said and did where not a reflection of me as a person but him and his inner demons. I was able to shed the damage he did to me pretty quickly and now I can honestly say I have forgiven him for what he did to us and I feel sorry for the person he is now because he hasn't really changed and I can't believe he is able to love life the way I am able to love life.

My mum on the other hand is a different story, she just turned 50 was diagnosed with terminal cancer 3 years ago and after being handed her death sentence she realised that she has been living with that abuse and never let go of it. She realises now that she lived under the cloak of that abuse for the past 23 years, that it weighed her down all that time and never allowed her to truly find happiness. And it wasn' t that she was fearfull of the abuse happening again, she had just stopped loving herself and had stopped allowing herself to be herself. Its like what he did to us actually broke her soul. Only now bits of her authentic self are emerging but only in brief moments because part of her is still afraid of herself and of loving who she is.

My little brother is 25, he broke of all contact with our father a little over a year ago, finally made peace with the fact that this was what happend and it wasn't his fault. That he was not to blame and that he could move on, that he is an intelligent person and not an idiot and that he derserves happiness.
Shortly after this he broke of his dysfunctional bordering on abusive (she to him) relationship with his girlfriend started going back to school in the evenings and is enjoying a good job close to home with prospects to grow and climb the ladder of success.
For he first time he is actually happy about his life and himself.

And it wasn't just us three who where affected by this, my mum remarried and we had a little sister, the baby of the family and she was allways doted on by us. However never having seen that self love present in my mum or me (at least not until she was a teenager) she has that same struggle to love herself and accept that she is awesome inside and out.

This is getting long! but all this to show that we lived without truly loving ourselves for a long time, and that the moment each of us decided to change this and start loving ourselves, ridding us of the burden we carried that wasn't ours to carry, life changed. It became better, richer, more beautiful. We got confidence to live our lives the way we want to and we found true happiness.

Now for my mum this is still something that hasn't really happend. She has moments where she is able to let go of this chocking cloak where a bit of her real self pops out and I don't know if she will manage to find that true happiness before she goes since time is running out so very quickly for her....

You see right now, this very moment is the only thing you have and you can spend it loving yourself and in turn being able to give more love , or you can spend it hating yourself and never truly loving this one moment you have right now.
Knowing the difference love makes just for myself makes me want to ensure every person everywhere finds the ability to love themselves, this is why I joined Sara in spreading her summer of self love blog relaunch.

I met Sara via the goddesguidbook circle and she asked for peeps who wanted to join in with celebrating the relaunch of her website so here I am :)

Sara will have a summer of self love over at her blog soul spackle.

What soul spackle you ask?

soul spackl-le (sohl spak-uh l ): noun Filler of holes in the spirit - the exact amount of soul needed in any situation.

And who is Sara?

I am just an East Coast girl living in a West-Coast world. Although I *do* dream of California canyons, I dream equally of coastal cottages, little mountain manors nestled deep in the hills with neighbors like Raven and Wolf, desert nights where the stars are so clearly seen without the pollution of light. And I am still a *girl* even though this girl's aging parents and the other vagaries of life itself have expanded the bands of silver at my temples. I'm trying to deny my age, I guess, but I'm thirty-something without all the trappings of a typical thirty-something. My children are my fabulous furbomb kitties, Astrid and Sunny, and my life is my own, although the apartment isn't. I am always writing something in my head. I'm a media junkie, and also a thrift store junkie, and I have a thing for color so I guess that means I'm a color junkie too. I never leave the library without a minimum of five new books; seldom does a day go by where I don't have a lightbulb moment with a creative idea; the idea usually isn't as interesting the following day, and hence I start lots of things but only finish a select few. It is in the idea-generating that I am most alive, and so I wish I could make a career out of it! And I love creative challenges, online ones and otherwise. They are often the only thing that gets me to finish something, like when I met my 50,000 word goal for the first time doing NaNoWriMo in 2006. This seemingly small accomplishment has led to many, many more accomplishments over the years. The bonus of getting older is being further and further removed from the "what's cool" game. I am not afraid that my Last.fm profile will give away the fact that I listen to the first Tiffany album and copious amounts of the wonderful Dan Fogelberg alongside The Killers and Regina Spektor, or that my Netflix queue may be full of Waltons episodes co-mingling with the latest Wong Kar-wai movie. I read as many self-help books as I do fiction ones (often more) and I'm trying to find the Goddess within. That means I have rocks and crystals in my house, I sometimes wear feathers, and yes, I talk to the Moon. I also talk to St. Anthony, St. Jude, the Two Marys, and my groovy big brother Jesus, even as I pat the bellies of my house Buddhas and read Siddhartha. If I could live inside poetry, I would crawl into a collection of Rumi poems, or I would set up shop inside Mary Oliver's "Wild Geese", where the soft animal of my body would be free to love what it loves. And I'm not going to apologize for any of it, because I would never make you apologize for being you. In fact, I would celebrate you and me and the Sun and the Moon and the Stars and everything, each minute that we have, which is finite and therefore sacred.

She can be found at her blog soul spackle, the goddess guidebook circle and also on Twitter and facebook

I have contributed to her mega self love basket which will be given away  on her blog on the 1st of July!